French woman admits making up anti-Semitic attack

Page Tools

A French woman who claimed last week she had been the victim of a vicious anti-semitic attack admitted to police yesterday that she had made up the entire incident, and was detained for falsely reporting a crime.

After being questioned for a second time by investigators about the alleged incident on July 9, which shocked France and shed a negative light on government efforts to stamp out anti-semitism, the woman admitted she had lied.

The 23-year-old had initially told police that a gang of six youths had accosted her on a suburban train outside Paris, slashing her clothes and drawing swastikas on her stomach after mistaking her for a Jew.

"The first declarations of the young woman reveal that her accusations were lies and that she had been making it all up," the public prosecutor's office said in a statement.

The woman admitted to "having made knife cut marks on herself, cut off a lock of her own hair and drawn swastikas on her body," it said.

Doubts had mounted today over her claim after no-one came forward to corroborate the story, despite the fact that she said some 20 people had witnessed the alleged incident.

AdvertisementAdvertisement

She changed her story yesterday, too, to say that she and her 13-month-old child had been assaulted outside the train, but finally admitted that she had totally invented the attack, police said.

The woman has been placed in preventive detention for falsely reporting a crime, state prosecutor Xavier Salvat said. She could face up to six months in prison and a 7500 euro ($12,836) fine if tried and convicted.

Her boyfriend has also been detained, police said.

French President Jacques Chirac yesterday called the case "regrettable", but stood by his swift condemnation of the incident.

"It's a regrettable affair," Chirac said during his annual Bastille Day televised interview broadcast live on TF1 and France 2 television of the case that sparked outrage across the country.

"Whenever there is manipulation, the manipulator must be punished," he added.

Last week, Chirac called for perpetrators of anti-semitic, racist and homophobic acts to face tough punishment, and has excluded racist crimes from his annual July 14 clemency for prisoners.

"The explosion in the number of racist and anti-semitic acts committed in our country these past few years is a reality that we must fight," government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope said.

The number of such incidents recorded in France - home to Europe's largest Jewish and Muslim communities - soared in the first half of the year, according to interior ministry figures.

The woman had testified that her alleged attackers - whom she described as black and Arab North Africans - believed her to be Jewish after discovering that she had once lived in the French capital's upmarket 16th district.

"Only Jews live in the 16th district," one of the men was quoted as saying when the group purportedly assaulted the woman, took her bag and tipped over the baby carriage with her baby inside.

But investigators said closed-circuit cameras at the station northeast of Paris where the woman said the attackers had left the train did not show the six youths.

Railway personnel at the ticket office where the woman said she reported the affair could remember nothing about it, investigators said.

A 28-year-old man said he had seen the woman on the platform of the station where she said she boarded the train before the attack.

He said her clothes were already torn and she was crying, adding: "I asked her if she wanted help and she said no."

A police source said that the woman had filed six prior complaints in recent years - among them one for theft and one for sexual assault - but that the alleged criminals had never been found.

Mouloud Aounit, president of the Movement against Racism and for Friendship among Peoples (MRAP), demanded a public apology over the incident.

"We can't fight against one racism by making statements that advocate another kind of racism," he said.